I remember my first time crawling a Giant Flea Market
Man I went crazy buying every old pocket knife, cigar lights and not to mention Canon Cameras. This place was open only on the weekends and it had lots of old time vendors that had used items. Well, OK a lot of it was just junk. But as the saying goes “On man’s trash is another man’s cash.” Many of the sellers were from out of country and they didn’t know our cultures memorabilia. Like for example McDonalds mugs from the 1970’s. I was getting them for 25¢ cents and selling them for $12.00 plus buyers paid the shipping.
However finding that it’s a good idea to stay away from anything glass type that are breakables. Learned a good lesson with this Geordi Laforge Star Trek mug. I didn’t take the picture of the inside of the mug. For years I had been using it as a pen holder. It had a few spots of ink at the bottom and the guy got angry and sent it back. Claiming it was a birthday gift for a friend and was going to use it as a drinking mug. I refunded him before I received a broken mug back.
Just like the first lighter I sold, not only gave the guy a positive feedback first, shipped it out before receiving the payment. Luckily ebay has both buyer and seller protections in place to keep things on the up and up.
In the beginning “What I did wrong”
Not so much wrong, more like the long way around the block way. I was not weighing my items at home, obviously didn’t own a Shipping Scale.
It was OK at first (and I must say very exciting) going to the post office with my newly sold ebay items. However, some times the profit margins would go down a bit. The scale really helped me with deciding how much to charge for shipping. In fact years ago many ebay sellers would do the old bait and switch. Meaning, they would charge say $2.00 for an item. For this example the item is a ink pen, $2.00 for the pen and $11.00 for shipping. Of course to ship a pen would only be like 3 bucks and they would make $8.00 off shipping and $2.00 of the price of the pen.
These days ebay has so many items being sold there is a good chance you will be selling something already listed by your fellow ebayer. That’s not a bad thing, don’t worry like the saying goes “There’s no such thing as competition”. What this does is all the old ebayers have already put in all the size and weight of hundreds of thousands of items and when you list your similar item ebay shows you the items STATS and you can go by that to a certain extent. Really best practice is use the scale.
Many times without having a Shipping Scale and just guesstimating, I would most likely have to add some money at the post office. These days the United States Post Office is not only integrated with ebay, if you do your own label and weighing your items you can just go to the counter and drop off your sold package. It’s really great you don’t have to wait in the line. However I was be a bit paranoid in the beginning I would wait in the line and get a re-slip just to make sure. Don’t ask me why guess it was a security thing.
How to find what to sell?
I had some great stuff. I’m sure if you look around your home and go through some old things in your attic and basement and or garage you will surly find hot items to sell on ebay. That said, I had an extensive collection of vintage lighters, and pocket knives alone with my Star Trek collection. They sold in auction listing very quickly, so sticking to the plan when on my quest for the perfect pock knifes and lighters it was an easy task as at the time I knew what I was looking for. Many people don’t know there are American knife manufactures that have gone out of business years ago. The only people that have this knowledge are the collectors. Making them my target market. Just like with the Star Trek and the lighters I was selling on my free ebay account.
I also ventured into other items, both new and used. Many of the flea markets today sell new stuff. You should look for new but old or AKA vintage. Now going way, way, way, before I did ebay I would sell at the live flea markets myself. Hand tools were huge back then. I would go to yard sales to stock up hand tools to sell at the flea market. Yup it sounds weird I know. When the man of the house became no longer man of the house weather by natural causes or by divorce the lady of the house would put out all the tools for pennies. Being there to cash in is a well orchestrated well planed out strategy I learned to master.
Over time it became hard work
Over the years, the flea market vendors got savvy to what we ebayers were up to. So being the entrepreneurs that they are they raised the prices of mostly all the items that were vintage and so forth. This really made it hard to find low priced items so sell on ebay now and a lot more traveling and scavenging. At times I had to stop selling, one thing great about a free ebay account once you stop selling you don’t have to spend any money on anything. Turning to classified ads in local craigslist.org what ever was left over I tried to sell in bulk. It wasn’t too bad basically making back some money for items I had bought a year ago and so on.
Over time I learned a great way to sell on ebay without the hassle and time consuming of going on the hunt for hot items to sell on ebay. It’s a really great way if you’re and old guy like myself and hate driving to the post office and flea markets.
My eBay 